Caterina Mora’s Public defence

caterina daniela mora jara’s artistic doctoral project Conflicted Embodiment: Dancing Trans-Atlantic Migrant Dances has been published in DiVA.
Link to DiVA: Doctoral thesis

Participants

PhD candidate:
caterina daniela mora jara

Opponent:
La Saula

Committee:
Find Committee Biography below
Lilia Mestre
Martin Hargreaves
Petra Bauer
Ulrika Berg (substitute) 

Principal supervisor:
Chrysa Parkinson

Supervisor: 
Eleonora Fabião

Chair: 
Cecilia Roos 

Practicalities

• Shoes: Street shoes are not permitted inside Studio 16. Clean indoor shoes, flip-flops, or socks may be worn inside.
• The event will not be live streamed.
• The venue is fully accessible.
   

Schedule 

13:00–13:05 Welcome Chair of the Defence (Cecilia Roos) + Head of Subject Area (Martin Sonderkamp)
13:05–13:20 Presentation by respondent (caterina daniela mora jara)
13:20–13:40 Summary by the opponent (La Saula)
13:40–14:20 Discussion between opponent and respondent
14:20–14:40 Break 
14:40– Questions from committee followed by questions from audience
Break
Deliberation of the committee
The result is announced 

Defence Committee (Biography)

Opponent
Saul Garcia-Lopez aka La Saula is an active performance artist, professor in performance and the program director for the MA in Performance at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. Saula is an accomplished performance artist currently working and experimenting with his/their artistic universe, scholarly work, and living and embodied pedagogies as an assemblage of artistic research and artistic creation. Saula is former co-artistic director (2013-2023) of the interdisciplinary art organization La Pocha Nostra, with around 400 international collaborators in all types of productions such as performances (physical and virtual), artistic international workshops, and writing creation. Saula´s specific areas of development and research interest are related to theater, directing, performance theory and pedagogy including indigenous perspectives, gender, ethnicity, national identities and stereotypes, postcoloniality and decoloniality, and Latin American/Chicano performance art and theater. Saula is currently the research leader of the externally funded and international artistic development project Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges, supported by Hk-dir/PKU. La Saula is co-author of the book La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for The Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society, published by Routledge in 2021. Saula is also the author of A Meditative Rant on the Importance of Addressing Ethnicity While Teaching Eurocentric Performance Methods, an essay part of the book Latinx Actor Training edited by Cynthia Santos-DeCure and Micha Espinosa, Routledge 2023.

Committee members
Lilia Mestre (she/her), (PT/BE/CA) | is a performing artist, dramaturge, and researcher specializing in collaborative choreography. She uses scores, inter-subjective setups, and chance-based processes as tools for social and political reflection. Mestre was Artistic Coordinator of the a.pass postgraduate program in Brussels and is currently an Assistant Professor in Contemporary Dance and co-director of LePARC (Performing Arts Research Cluster) at the MILIEUX Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology at Concordia University, Montreal. She holds a FRQSC grant 2025-2028 for the research creation project Keep in Touch! – critical embodiments for possible future(s) (2025-28).

Martin Hargreaves works within dramaturgical vacillations and pedagogic chancing, instigating or inhabiting various collaborative constellations with choreographic possibilities. A dramaturg and writer, Martin’s research connects around pedagogy, performance and performativity and includes the recent histories of contemporary dance, queering practices and camp misunderstandings. He has a visiting lecturer post at Stockholm University of the Arts and has also lectured and examined at institutions across the UK and Europe. Martin is Head of the Rose Choreographic School, an experimental research and pedagogy project at Sadler’s Wells.

Petra Bauer is an artist and filmmaker based in Stockholm whose practice unfolds through long-term collaborations at the intersection of feminist politics, social movements, and the moving image. She approaches filmmaking not merely as representation but as a shared method—one that listens, questions, and builds solidarities across difference. Her work engages film as a space for collective inquiry, political memory, and the rehearsal of alternative forms of life. Bauer studied at the Malmö Art Academy and holds a PhD from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. She is currently Professor in Film & Media and responsible for the research area Art, Technology & Materiality at Stockholm University of the Arts, and has held a professorship in moving image at the Royal Institute of Art since 2016.
Over the years, she has co-developed cinematic and pedagogical processes with grassroots networks—ranging from SCOT-PEP’s advocacy for sex workers’ rights in Scotland, to collaborations with Southall Black Sisters in London, feminist archives and women’s centres across Europe. She has also worked closely with activist Carolina Sinisalo and filmmaker Marius Dybwad Brandrud in exploring grief, resistance, and political witnessing through film. These projects are shaped by a politics of listening, where storytelling becomes both a form of resistance and a practice of care.
Her films and research have been presented at venues such as The Showroom, Collective, Fruitmarket, Tensta konsthall, the Venice Biennale, and Museo Reina Sofía, among others.

Ulrika Berg (subsitute) is a Stockholm based dance artist and educator.
Since 2015, Ulrika has been working as an assistant professor of Dance at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), at the subject areas Dance and Dance Pedagogy.
As a dancer she has worked with, amongst others, Cristina Caprioli, Jeanine Durning, Philip Berlin, Janne-Camilla Lyster, Ludvig Daae, Tino Segahl and with Cullberg in works by Ezster Salamon and Deborah Hay.
She has a master's degree in choreography from New Performative Practices, SKH.

PhD candidate BIO: https://www.uniarts.se/english/people/co-workers/caterina-mora/
caterina daniela mora jara (b.1988) is an Argentinian-Chilean performing artist and researcher coming from the territory called Patagonia by expeditionary colonizers. She is currently doing a PhD at SKH.
Trained in academic and folkloric dance, her work aims to problematize modes of production and the colonial legacy in the representation of Western dance. She got married to have a residency permit on European territory, she doesn’t have an Instagram account and has never gone into an IKEA store. She might try to hug you while saying hello.